blog-for-my-history-prof

[blog-for-my-history-prof]

I LOVE LIVE MUSIC I LOVE LIVE ORCHESTRAS I LOVE FEELING THE MUSIC IN MY BONES

My professor just said that we don't talk enough about the feeling of listening to live orchestras versus synthesized music and it just isn't the same!! He's so right for this I love live music

[blog-for-my-history-prof]

Ok since tumblr is deciding to be picky today (I still love you tumblr) I'm going to make a fourth attempt and hope for the best!

Hi! I'm writing this as an explanatory presentation for the big project that I need to do for my music history class. And what better way to do this than with memes and a long tumblr post! The format of my project would be a series of blog posts diving deeper into each of the topics that I will identify throughout this post.

For context, the Korean pop group Ateez (debuted 2018 with 8 members) participated in a competition called Kingdom: Legendary War. This competition put different groups against each other for the goal of publicity, and to find out which group was the most versatile and talented. For this event, the groups had to perform some original songs as well as cover other groups' songs (for example, Stray Kids covered BTS' "I'll Be Your Man" as part of this event.) Ateez took one of their previous songs, "Wonderland" (2019) and reworked it to include hints of Pirates of the Caribbean and Antonin Dvořák's 9th Symphony to present at the show in 2021.

To begin, Ateez's debut concept was one word: "Pirates". A debut concept in Korean pop is some kind of aesthetic to attract new fans that would be interested in the style of music promised, and provides a storyline for future album releases. For example, EXO's theme is "Alien" while Dreamcatcher has a more "Darkness" vibe to their performances, which makes their shows truly chilling. With that in mind, there is no denying that Ateez has put on an incredible performance with this song. The stage decor, the costumes, and the massive kraken making an appearance-- all hint towards maximalism influence. It is worth mentioning that 3-dimentional projections are relatively common in shows, but some can be really cool. (And horrifying. Check out this bigass spider that Stray Kids had on top of their stage for their performance at the MAMA 2022 award show. Rest in peace to all the people with arachnophobia.)

Regardless, incorporating the musical theme from Pirates of the Caribbean makes sense with their concept, but the inclusion of Dvořák's Symphony still needs more digging to make sense.

The inclusion of Dvořák's Symphony in Ateez's Wonderland is deliberate. This unlikely fusion of musical styles is an intersection of the Korean pop culture with the Western music traditions-- which Korean pop was already doing to a certain extent. The genre resonates with people from across the world, so to make it more accessible and appealing to listeners, the artists started including both Korean and English lyrics, effectively creating a bilingual genre of music. The expansion of this toolkit not only added much more versatility and flow to the lyrics, but also helped the music reach a much wider audience. Some Kpop groups have even experimented with releasing Japanese versions of their Korean songs!

In addition to the last point, the inclusion of Dvořák's Symphony complements the lyrics surprisingly well. Wonderland starts with a fragment of a movement from the symphony, which represents the "New World" (hence its nickname) or America, when it was still "new" and "undiscovered". In the fifth line of the lyrics, Hoongjong sings "gonna find a new world to be mine" which lines up perfectly with the meaning behind the 9th symphony. The fragment of the piece is played on horns, making the section all the more triumphant and epic as well as accentuating the message of the lyrics. Also, Wonderland is quite similar in title to New World...

While Ateez has an excellent arrangement of this piece mashed into their song, they are not the first group to combine classical music with Kpop. For example, Jimin from BTS samples Manuel de Falla's "La Vida Breve" (1904) in his solo song "Lie" (2016), while Gfriend uses "A Poet's Love" from Robert Schumann in "Summer Rain" (2017). But while Ateez might be simply hopping onto this trend, this proves that taking the old and making something new out of it will never go out of fashion. If it does, we'll just have to bring it back and make something new from it!

With that in mind, the inclusion of Dvořák's Symphony into Ateez's Wonderland has an impact on an issue we already touched on earlier: accessibility. Many people look down on Kpop as a genre because they think of it as too basic, or cringe, or simply too formulaic for them. (To quote my brother, he told me that "Kpop songs all sound the same and the singers all look the same too".) While a lot of songs in the genre have the structure and the length of mainstream popular songs, not all of them are necessarily the same. (Some of them can be pretty bad, though-- I cringe every time I hear "Cat and Dog" by TXT, it's so funny hahah) Adding classical music to the genre might attract more listeners to the songs, where they can find something they know and latch onto it as a bridge to appreciate the rest of the music. Dvořák's Symphony in Ateez's Wonderland is appealing to the classical listeners who might not have had that point of contact to get to new music styles before.

It is worth mentioning that the musical style in this song is quite elaborate and polished, which reminds of classical traditions. At a certain point, Jungho sings a B5, which is somewhat like a cadenza in the classical world-- something to show off a soloist's skills that is usually technically challenging and quite impressive. In the revised version of Wonderland released in 2021, the particular singer decided to make the top note even higher and longer than what he sang in the version released in 2019. This decision really helped maximize the impact of the re-release along with the added classical music sampling.

To summarize, it's really cool, and this entire post feels like this:

I'm really looking forward to working on this project!

[blog-for-my-history-prof]

Hello and welcome to my blog!! This is one that I created to be able to keep track of my big project that I need to do for my music history class. It's going to be a wild ride, so buckle up!